


Life, The Universe, and Everything

by Schgain



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Generally this was written before The Suffering Game premiered, POV Second Person, Taako's POV, The observant reader might realize virtually nothing at all actually happens, What-If, Written for TAZ Lady Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 02:39:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9798944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schgain/pseuds/Schgain
Summary: Taako talks with and about my OC Schrodinger, as a what-if antagonist for the Animus Bell.





	

The drow woman is hovering about fifteen centimeters off the ground, flizzling in and out of solidity. When you look at her here, through the Ethereal Plane, she isn't subdued like the rest of the world- her colors are still that purple, that scarlet, that strawberry pink. She still moves, like snow on a crystal monitor. On the Material Plane, she exists a series of jumbled polygons and particles. She looks like a bethesda glitch, like electron photograms and old star chart polaroids all at once. Her form keeps shedding and accumulating little pinkish particles that glow gold when you look at them. She is not a frozen moment in time like everyone else is when you Blink, and you realize what she'd meant before when she described herself as "scattered". She exists here and in the Material Plane, and possibly countless others, simultaneously. Blinking always comes with a shot of pain through your side, like a stitch after you're forced to run. You wonder how that feels, all over one's body, constantly.

But... Yeah, you digeess. When you look at her through the Ethereal Plane, she doesn't look like the angry incorporeal hardly even humanoid shape you'd come to know her as. She just looks... Sad. And maybe you can empathize with that a little bit. 

"I'll never understand." she says, apropo of nothing, and you look at her, for real this time, instead of just trying to wrap your head around what you're looking at. She's staring at her hands, which are particularly immaterial. 

"What do you mean, Doc?" because your sense of self preservation is waning, and you don't think she can hurt you here. At least, you hope she can't. Either way, she doesn't, and if you could sigh in relief here you just might.

Schrodinger looks at the washed out forms of Magnus and Merle, stationary from this dimensional viewpoint. You follow her line of sight, Magnus holding a hand out to help Merle to his feet. The soft whites of the plane makes them look like marble, and if you came closer you'd mistake your two companions for a particularly complex Bernini. 

"Humans and dwarves commit atrocities all the time. So do orcs, so do giants, so do Eladrin." her voice is so soft, and it's covered in something almost like backmasking, like she's talking through a damaged record player. "Sentient peoples are all naturally good," she says, "but overcoming our nature is what separates us from the animals." she laughs, or you think she does, a sad little huff.

"Who said that?" you ask. "Sounds like a quote." 

"A woman long dead. Her name was Doctor Lucretia. She was a genius in magic. I wanted to meet her before the Relic War." 

You feel a chill run through you. It pools in the back of your throat. There are too many things to unpack there. Lucretia being assumed dead by the public, that's not a stretch. Sure. But this woman knowing things... No.3113 comes to mind, how the dead keep secrets that the Voidfish can't contain. 

"So why do you keep them around?" 

You blink. You don't Blink, but your eyelids flutter in confusion. She looks at you with an impenetrable expression, waiting for your response. 

"Wha?" you say intelligently. You hadn't been listening. She jerks her head in the direction of Merle and Magnus' statues. The action is terrifying- there's a sort of undercrank to her, like she's skipping frames on a film reel. Just staring at this woman makes you get a little vertigo. 

"The dwarf isn't going to live as long as you. The human, certainly not. I've seen how he behaves. He acts like he wants to shorten his already short lifespan." she considers him. "Well, at least he won't be alone when he crosses over." 

You stare at her. "How do you know that?" 

"You're going to outlive them. Why do you keep them around?" she ignores your question only to counter it. 

"Why does Magnus keep a dog around if he knows it's going to live one sixth of his lifespan, and that's being generous?" you shrug. Philosophising is for shitty greeting cards and particularly self-satisfied cake messages. 

"So they're pets." anger leaks into her voice and when you look up at her, she's studying you. Or glaring. It's hard to tell, but you are sufficiently terrified. 

"No!" you splutter, halfway between disgusted and confused. Disfused. No, that's not right. "They're just buds that I want to have around." 

"High Elves..." she spits your species name with a level of disgust you'd never heard before. "You have all of Faerun in your special little box of toys. You have your favorites, and your least favorites, but at the end of the day, they're there because you want them to be, and the moment you grow bored with them, or they don't want to play, you get rid of them." 

You think her analogy got away from her there. Her shoulders hunch, her form quivers. At first you think she's going to go all Busto again, but you look closely, and she's crying. 

"You put an entire people underground because you didn't like them! Because you thought we were ugly excuses of elves, who sullied your stupid etheral appearance, who made you look bad in all these other races you were so much better than but are for some reason so desperate to impress! And when we didn't want to be pushed away, you made up reasons to get rid of us! Do you have ANY IDEA what that feels like?!" 

She gasps for air she doesn't need to breathe, sobbing. Thick tears roll down her face, undignified and unrestrained. 

"They called us Drow violent but never thought to exterminate actual warring races, because that's never your problem or your fault! When you couldn't kill us outright you made us sick, you made us poor, you shoved us underground so you didn't have to look at what a shameful blotch we were on the face of Faerun, but you're so fine with keeping the FUCKING HUMANS around!" She flings a wild arm towards Magnus. "Why? Why were THEY worth saving? But not... Not..." 

You look up at her. Horror bleeds across your face as her form barely is anything but a colorful mass of purple white and red. You don't know what to do. You don't know how to fix this. 

You try to think of what a good person might say. You try to think of what anyone else might say. You take a deep breath. Admitting blame has never been easy for you. 

"I can't fix what they did to you. And I know that even though I got the short end of the stick too, I can't really compare my hurt to a whole lot of Drows hurting together. But I know what it feels like to not be wanted." you reach up into the writhing polygonal glitch that is Schrodinger, through the fire that doesn't feel hot, let alone burn you. Something grabs your fingers. Not tight, just enough to ground, and you tug it. 

Her hand forms through the mass, then her arm, her atoms piecing together slowly. 

"Hell, I even know what death feels like too, and if you're feeling that, over and over--"

"Constantly," she says. She breathes it, like a desperate affirmation. 

"Right! Man, you must have a lot of mental willpower. You didn't even turn into a lich." You offer her a crooked smile that doesn't feel as genuine on your face that it feels in your heart or whatever, and her torso and face flutter back to mostly-solid. She's still leaking particles or whatever, but that's par for the course. Some of it is stuck to your hand, and yu turn it in the constant white light of the Ethereal plane. It'd make a good eyeshadow color.

"I don't want to feel this way." she uses the hand not clutching yours to wipe tears off her cheeks. They evaporate as she flicks them away. 

"You know, we're pretty good problem solvers, me and the dynamic dipshits. What do you think we could do, huh?" you don't have the highest hopes in putting her back to normal, but you have to talk her out of this meltdown before she kills you all. 

"I need the Animus Bell." 

You frown. "No, you don't! It's tricking you--"

She looks ready to cry again. "You don't understand! I need it. It's the only thing that can put me together again. I'm not... Enough of a person to be affected by the Thrall. This is just unfortunate fact." she doesn't expect you to believe her. But there's no addiction in her features, and whatever this Bell does is probably along the lines of Necromancy. Which means it will put her back together, or destroy her, or give her innumerable necromantic power past what she already has.

You don't trust easily, but you think considering the circumstances, you need to trust her word on that. Resolve settles in on you, and you nod. "Let's get you a fuckin' relic, Homegirl."

She laughs, honest to god, some nervous not-understanding chuckle. She has no idea how to react around you when calm, but that's okay.

"What are you going to do?" she asks. You shrug. 

"What I do best. Pull some bullshit, waste time, maybe buy you a little extra. This Taako truck has turned into a Taako Stall." 

The joke falls flat on her, and she cocks her head. You wave it off. "Keep doing what you're doing, I'll keep us busy long enough for you to get there first. Well. Probably. Maybe. Just try not to kill us in the meantime, ya dig?" 

She smiles. It's genuine. It's unsettling. "I'll dig."

-

"Hey, T-Bone?" Magnus says, his voice eerily quiet. The breeze smells like flowers and it whips through the rotunda, fluttering his hair. Some mauve petals flutter by, and he catches one between his fingertips. 

"Yeah, man?" you gingerly pick up the Animus Bell and tip it back and forth in your hands. It's just a silver bell, tarnished so much that you can't even see your reflection in its curved surface. When you ring it, it produces no sound. Whatever Thrall there might once have been on this you can no longer feel, and the Relic is quiet; no sultry voice beckons you. You only know the ins and outs of death secondhand and through staticky non-memories, but this seems to coincide with what you know of the Raven Queen: a silent vigil, almost peaceful. You recall what the Chalice had said before, and you thinks maybe there isn't a thrall on this one after all, and someone just has to want to use it badly enough. 

"How'd you know letting her get the Animus Bell would work?" Magnus asks with his voice hoarse with tears, his shoulders no longer weighed down by loss. He cocks his head, listening to the windchimes that dangle from the gazebo's roof.

"I didn't. Just a lucky guess off the top of my head." You grin and flip your pomp. Better to not say anything about conspiring with the enemy or whatever. Bad form. 

"You nearly killed us based off a HUNCH?" Merle exclaims, and if he didn't wince right after saying that, you might've started an argument then and there. Magnus stops staring at flowers and whirligigs and goes to help him stand. You avert your eyes from the bloody burn that flares across Merle's side. 

"I figured," you say, "hey, if the Relic itself doesn't put her back to where she belongs, just the chance of getting to succeed in something might be enough to close up all that unfinished business, you dig?" you can't help the solemnity in your voice. It sucks. 

Merle sighs. There's no trace of the woman anymore, not even as an afterimage in the space she once occupied. They are, as far as they know, the only people who knew she was ever here. 

"So you don't think she was a bad dude?" Magnus opens up his backpack for the Bell to be dropped into. You set it gently inside, imagining it ring as Magnus hefts the bg onto his shoulders. But still, no sound comes out, and you frown. 

"Eh, I think she was a little bad. But she was just... Really really sick, like everyone else under the Thrall. She just wanted to be put back together again, and man, who could blame her?" You shrug. After talking with her, even you can't.

Magnus and Merle look at the Bell, then at each other, and none of them say anything until the cannonsphere is called. 

 

-

 

You stare at your stone of farspeech for a long moment. Somewhere far off, you can still hear windchimes. 

"Kravitz?" 

"What? Yeah? Yeah. I'm here. You need something?"

You fidget. You don't know how to say this. "So this mission, we popped someone today, I was just wondering if she checked in alright." 

You can feel Kravitz raise his eyebrows in interest. You can't see it, of course, but you know the ins and outs of every silly facial expression he makes in his attempts to remember how to make them.

"What's her name?" he asks. You cringe. You were hoping he'd say "sorry, that's classified" or even "I don't know", anything to stop your curiosity from getting the best of you. 

Curiosity killed the cat, but Schrodinger brought it back... In an unholy amalgamation that's occupying every quantum point in the planes, thus heating the cat to temperatures similar to that of the heat death of the universe and simultanously the cosmic background temerature. 

"Schrodinger, as far as I know. Didn't give any other to--"

Kravitz makes a sound like spitting out hot tea. You suspect he did just that. 

"You got Schrodinger?!" he cries. 

"Yep," you say into your elbow. Part of you pleas Istus to smite you right here. 

"Her Majesty the Raven Queen has had her best staff after her, since, well, I expect you know what happened! And you got her? How?"

"Funny story! She may or may not have used the Animus Bell--"

"WHAT?"

"But she didn't become some immortal god-trash, she just.... Faded apart." you shrug, not that Kravitz can see it. "We ended on kinda weird terms. She doing okay?"

Kravitz is silent. You flick an ear.

"Krav?"

"She, ah... If she was able to restore herself with the Bell, Taako, I regret to inform you she doesn't- ahem- exist."

Your eyes snap open. 

"Woah. Alright, uh, Cool." It's not. It's not cool. You were sort of hoping for... You don't know. A happy ending? Her being trapped in ghost jail for eternity for inconveniencing you? 

Closure, you guess.

"Were you close?" he's using his counseling tone again, and while you appreciate it, you don't think you can handle a feelings jam. 

"Nah, she just had some unfinished biz and all. And I was kind of expecting her to head your way after all that effort. But I mean, it's not my problem." 

If only you had called Kravitz while in the labyrinth the bell had created. Maybe Schrodinger could be raising hell somewhere cool, partying on some far-off plane, but the idea that no part of her remains at all, not even the stardust she was made of to begin with, is kind of disheatening. Like the work you did trying to make her sympathetic was for a whole load of jack and his brother shit. 

This is guilt. You feel guilt. 

"Let me know, Taako, if there's anything I can do. I'll alert Her Majesty that the Schrodinger case is closed." 

"You got it my man." you hang up first. You don't think you can stand to talk any more. 

Instead, you cast Blink.

**Author's Note:**

> Schro was pretty much designed from the beginning to be an antagonist for the Tres Horny Boys to face for the necromancy relic, before The Suffering Game came along. I wanted a complex character who sort of muddied the boundaries between living and dead, someone who could play off the mysteries surrounded THB's many deaths and staticked memories. I wondered... What could someone both living and dead be feeling? Would it hurt? Would they want to be alive or dead or be too volatile to even know what they want? Could a Relic actually fix a problem? Or would the cycle of tragedy just be continued? (And why not both?)
> 
> So I wrote Schrodinger. A drow scientist full of anger, both inwards and outwards, who wanted nothing more than the pursuit of discovery, and was punished for her icarus-like tendencies. 
> 
> It is of my firm belief that horror and tragedy are two sides of the same unfortunate coin. 
> 
> my twitter is @schgain if you liked schrodinger and want to see more of her ;M 
> 
> As always, kudos and comments greatly appreciated!


End file.
